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A court on Tuesday postponed the trial of nine Libyan policemen and a physician charged with torturing Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor to extract confessions. The defendants are charged with torturing the nurses and doctor to make them confess they deliberately infected hundreds of Libyan children with HIV in a hospital in the eastern town of Benghazi. The case was postponed to May 24 to give the defense more time to prepare. (Reuters). period!

This was the only news brief I found related to this case today. However, we all heard the Libyan leader, time and time again regarding this sad story. But what is the actual details? Was it a mistake? Who’s mistake? The doctor and nurses, or the Libyan system? Did they do it deliberately, or were they used as a tool?

All these question can be answered if you dig into the details of the story. IMHO, the Libyan kids, nurses and the doctor are all victims and the incident was used politically in a bad Libyan propaganda. And who else can make flashy news more than the “Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Arab Libyan Popular and Socialist Republic.” (that’s his official title - believe it or not)

I’ve selected the following news article which is only one week old. It details a side of the story that many of us don’t know about. Be the judge:

Bad science and rough justice in southern Libya

By David Adam
THE GUARDIAN , LONDON
Wednesday, May 11, 2005,Page 9

In 1999 a Bulgarian doctor called Zdravko Georgiev was working in southern Libya when he was told his wife had been arrested.

Kristiyana was a nurse at a children’s hospital in the northern town of Benghazi, where hundreds of the young patients were found to have been mysteriously infected with HIV. More arrests followed — four other Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor — while Georgiev himself was taken away several days later.

Six years on, he lives under the protection of the Bulgarian embassy in Tripoli. After more than a year of being held with no access to lawyers or the outside world, the medics were charged with deliberately infecting 400 children in their care with HIV, at least 40 of whom have since died of AIDS-related illnesses.

It was undoubtedly a tragedy, but were the foreign health workers to blame? No, said Luc Montagnier, the Paris virologist who co-discovered HIV and was allowed into the Benghazi hospital to investigate.

He insists the outbreak has all the hallmarks of accidental cross-contamination, where poor hygiene and ineffective sterilization procedures allowed contaminated blood to be spread between patients from a single infected child.

“This was a very sad accident but it was not a crime,” Montagnier said.

Last year, a Libyan court disagreed and declared the foreigners guilty. Georgiev, who had never even worked at the hospital, was released with a suspended sentence. Kristiyana and the others were sentenced to death by firing squad. Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi said he believes the medics are guilty, though has offered to reconsider their fate if Libya is paid US$5.7 billion compensation and Britain frees the Libyan convicted of the Lockerbie bombing.

Kristiyana and the other five — Valya Chervenyashka, Snezhana Dimitrova, Nasya Nenova, Valentina Siropulo and Ashraf Ahmad Jum’a — now face their last chance. Libya’s Supreme Court is due to announce its verdict on their final appeal on May 31. Observers are not hopeful. Libya, they say, needs a scapegoat.

“If the Bulgarian nurses are found innocent, then the guilt goes on the Libyan medical staff of the Benghazi Hospital,” Montagnier said.

In a bizarre twist, 10 policemen involved in the investigation go on trial in Libya next week, accused of torturing the foreign workers into signing confessions — the only hard evidence.

Scientists are furious at the way the expert opinion of their community was ignored in the case. Leading virologists from across the world have sent an open letter to Qaddafi urging him to commute the sentences. An editorial in Nature said that events in Libya “should chill the blood of anyone who cares for justice and the use of scientific evidence in its name”

“It’s a travesty of justice. The notion that this doctor and these nurses were deliberately infecting children is just totally absurd. From the humane point of view there was no reason they should do it, and from the scientific point of view there is no evidence they did,” said Thomas Lehner, an HIV expert at King’s College London who signed the Qaddafi letter.

Vittorio Colizzi, a molecular pathologist at Tor Vergata University in Rome, who helped Montagnier investigate events at the hospital, said: “We were supposed to have free access to all the materials and data to make an objective study. But officials tried to block us at every step. Science itself has been on trial here and lost.”

Montagnier and Colizzi both appeared as expert witnesses at the trial.

“We produced a report and testified before the court, but after that the court decided to ask for a counter report from five Libyan doctors who are not very aware of HIV. The court used that report and not ours. How can they justify that? The lives of six people are at stake,” Montagnier said.

Colizzi said the evidence uncovered by their investigation meant the case should never have reached trial. For starters, hospital records showed some of the children were infected before the foreign workers arrived in 1998. Others caught the virus only after they had been arrested — including one HIV positive baby not even born until the health workers were behind bars.

The chief scientific evidence presented by the prosecution was an analysis of HIV virus samples in two vials allegedly found in the home of one of the nurses. In the court, a Libyan doctor presented the vials along with the results of an antibody test called a Western-blot analysis, which he said proved the HIV outbreak started from stocks secretly kept by the foreign medics.

Montagnier said the Western blot results were so scrambled they were meaningless and planned to reanalyse the vial viruses using PCR, a more powerful comparative tool. But hospital officials never made the vials available.

Montagnier and Colizzi were able to take blood samples from many of the children, where they found compelling evidence of contamination. Many of the children were infected with other viruses, including hepatitis C.

“This is a an indication of bad hygiene as normally children have very low rates of hepatitis C,” Montagnier said.

Could not the foreign medics have transmitted the hepatitis C along with HIV, if they deliberately injected the children? Unlikely, Montagnier said, because several different hepatitis C strains were discovered. In contrast, the HIV type was the same in each case — a rare and previously unrecorded strain that originated in west Africa when two existing viruses combined.

Incredibly, Montagnier said the scientific term for this process, recombination, was mistranslated into Arabic for the court as “genetically modified” — implying a deliberate act.

“This just showed they were not experts in HIV,” Montagnier said. “Many non-scientists could have the same confusion.”

Prosecutors also presented the fact that the virus found in the children was previously unidentified, again implying it had been deliberately introduced.

“On the contrary, if this strain was already recorded in laboratories we could have concluded that someone could had taken the virus and injected it,” Montagnier said. “But if it’s a rare strain then it couldn’t have been taken from a patient.”

They also found further evidence of sloppy standards in the hospital. Two of the 50 staff were HIV positive — a rate way above normal.

“I would say there was very little care about using material infected with HIV,” Montagnier said.

None of this helped to sway the court’s decision, so what can be done now? Joost Den Otter, a Dutch doctor who briefly visited the six imprisoned medics in February, on behalf of US group Physicians for Human Rights, said they are in a “desperate state.”

Political pressure on Qaddafi may help, but Montagnier said the best hope could be establishing a formal collaboration between Libya, Bulgaria and the EU to help the infected children and their families, and to fund research on the virus strain.

“The problem is to find a solution in which nobody will lose face,” he said.

It’s your judgment now!

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